People all over the world have different ideas about what is spiritual. For some the Ganges River, Mecca, or Jerusalem are holy and spiritual places. Some people feel spiritual power from things like blessed medals, crystals, or sarira, which can be bits of the Buddha’s teeth or skull, or more often the crystalline bits that can be found in a monks ashes after cremation. Icons, mandalas, or bujeok (Korean Shamanistic protection talisman glyphs) hold spiritual meaning for many people as well.. What are the things, places, or people that you consider to be spiritual? Would you consider a Rolls Royce, a diamond necklace from Cartier, or Wall Street to be spiritual? A great majority of people would give a very definitively negative response of, “No!” For many if not most of us who are interested in spirituality, the world is divided into two realms, the spiritual and materialistic, or in older parlance, the sacred and the profane.
Have you heard other people or even yourself say, “I’m not interested in money or other material stuff; I’m much more interested in spiritual things?” I can count myself among their numbers. I used to look with disdain on material wealth or abundance feeling my own self-righteousness. I bought into aphorisms such as “Money is the root of all evil,” or “Idle hands are the devil’s playthings.” It is understandable as many spiritual and religious teachings seem to suggest that the material world is at best inferior to the world of spirit, and at worst, just plain evil. This kind of thinking has lead to people believing that our bodies, everything that the bodies do, and the things that come out of our bodies are defiled, and in some traditions women in particular were and are seen as the ultimate symbol of physical defilement and uncleanness. I never went all the way down that rabbit hole, but I got pretty close to the edge of despising or at least distaining the physical world, which is odd when you look around at all of the beauty that we can see around us if we open our eyes.
There really is an abundance of beauty in the physical and material world. Nature holds the prime place for physical beauty from the sometimes subtle and sometimes dramatic colors of sunsets to the majesty of mountain ranges graced with trees and capped with snow. Mother Nature gave us our first models of beauty. We humans looked to nature and first copied, and then began to create new works of beauty on our own. We made everything from shell bracelets, to pyramids, to Smartphones, and more. Are any of these things intrinsically more or less spiritual than the other? I will make a very bold statement. I now know that they are all equally spiritual in a very specific way.
The essential question is, “what is matter?” What is this stuff that we see around us and that we live with, including our bodies? How did it originate? If you have interest in spirituality and acknowledge a non-physical, spiritual existence, then you will probably agree that the material world originated in spirit. People’s descriptions of how that all happened can be very different depending on the tradition they grew up in or subscribe to now, but all spiritual traditions that I know of describe this material stuff, whether you think it’s real or feel more comfortable describing it as an illusion or maya[1], as having come from an original intelligent creator that exists beyond the confines of time and space. All of us who have a sense of a spiritual realm believe this material stuff was created by the Original Consciousness that I call God or Source, but some call Brahman, Allah, Great Mother, or Mind. So, what did the Creator create all of this out of? The simplest answer is that this stuff came from the spiritual or non-physical predecessor to the material. All of these atoms and subatomic particles flying around the universe are made of and not distinct from their non-physical origins. We create a false dichotomy when we distinguish between spirit and matter. Such segregation doesn’t exist. There isn’t this material stuff over here, and there isn’t that spiritual stuff over there. It is all one: from the Ganges River in India, to the Great Wall of China, to the West Edmonton Mall in Canada, to Wall Street of the United States. It’s all spirit playing and creating of itself.
If this is all spirit and so intrinsically spiritual, why do so many people feel called to forgo the “world” and go off to live a life of either simplicity of privation to be spiritual? Yogis, Buddhist and Christian monks and nuns, mystics of every shape and color all seem to renounce material things in favor of spiritual ones. The answer may seem crass, but I believe it is true. It is simpler, easier if you will, to clear out the clutter of our minds and hearts to focus on the progenitor spirit when there are fewer things to take care of in our lives. These material objects can be very distracting, absorbing, and fascinating. Material objects and ownership can also cause confusion and imbalance in our minds and hearts. That is not because there is anything particularly wrong with the diamond necklaces or fancy cars, but because our minds so easily become absorbed by the very obvious material world that fills our sensory perceptions. We came into these physical bodies to delight in the experience of having physical senses, but we so easily lose sight of the larger picture which is the foundation of spirit and non-physical origins. This physical world of apparent borders, boundaries, separation, and number fools us into seeing lack and limitation with our physical senses. We don’t recognize the infinite` abundance and possibility that our non-physical Selves, our spirits or souls, see, and we instead fear the loss or lack of resources, time, and even love, forgetting that we, as spirit born beings, have the infinite ability to create more of all of these things. We get so distracted by what we experience with our five senses that we begin to identify` entirely with the physical things we see, feel, and own. In other words, we very often see the physical` stuff that is our bodies and our possessions` as representations of our entire selves. This can cause us to want to hold onto what we have and do anything necessary to get more. We then fall prey to all of the negative attitudes of greed, lust, avarice, gluttony, and more. So, it is not the objects themselves, but the way that we perceive, use, and understand this matter that has become problematic for so many of us. However, the deeper truth is that Spirit is vibrant in all of it; we are the ones who are so often lacking in proper perspective..
All of this material stuff that we see and experience with our senses is fully spiritual in that it is spirit manifest just as each one of us is also manifested spirit. I don’t even think that there is any deeper truth to be gained to asking if there is spirit that is not manifested, because that question is also born of a physical mindset of divisions, separation, and duality. The nonphysical, or in other words spiritual, is equally present in a subatomic particle as it is in the entirely of the perceived universe. As such it is equally possible to experience the Divine and all of the divine qualities in any and all the stuff you encounter and live with. There is a famous Buddhist story of a Korean monk call Wonhyo who attained enlightenment. The story says that he and a friend, Uisang, were travelling to study in China when they took shelter from a storm in a cave. During the night Wonhyo was thirsty and reached out for a gourd dipper and felt refreshed by the clean tasting water. The next morning he was shocked to see that it had been a skull filled with repulsive looking water. At that moment he attained enlightenment. That old skull holding dirty water was his door to the deep understanding of truth of this physical experience and an opening to the Creating Mind. He found new life in death. He realized the truth of the fullness of Love, Joy, Wellbeing, and Awareness being present even in the defiled bones of the dead. It doesn’t require attainment of enlightenment to grasp this. You and I can begin now to reach for the perception of the spiritual reality that is manifesting in all the material stuff we are aware of.
[1] Maya (in sanskrit माया) in Hindu texts is often translated as illusion in English.
